The online retail business is a competitive place with hundreds of eCommerce platforms available to power them. With little to no knowledge of managing online businesses, everyone looks for a platform that helps them start a business and scale up effortlessly with time. Choosing an eCommerce platform is not difficult, but if you start with the wrong choice of eCommerce platform, you might harm your business right from the start.
Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online business is no less than setting a foundation. Before making a choice, you should know more about eCommerce platforms in general. With hundreds of eCommerce platforms available, some platforms are emerging as absolute winners in the late years. These are the platforms you should look out for in the upcoming years. In the list below, you will find the top most eCommerce platforms to look out for in 2020. Let us take a closer look.
BetterCommerce
BetterCommerce tops the list with its perfect combination of advanced technology and reliable services. It offers a set of headless eCommerce modules and APIs that work towards building your business within your budget and at your comfortable pace. Be it B2C Commerce or B2B commerce, BetterCommerce focuses on the technicalities such that you can focus on your business. With better real-time analytics, you can enjoy regular reports and alerts and work on betterment. With advanced and integrated OMS, you can increase and automate the productivity of your warehouse operations across all channels.
The standard features of BetterCommerce are the ones that competitor platforms offer as advanced features – Private Cloud, Global Commerce, Omnichannel AI-Driven, etc., which further helps enhance customer experience. It provides customization with stability for an enhanced customer experience.
With BetterCommerce, you get access to all features required to manage sales, inventory, operations, marketing, merchandising, purchasing, logistics, and customer support under one roof. Furthermore, BetterCommerce will easily integrate with your existing system, minimizing run time. Once live, you get to manage your store with a comprehensive set of tools, which would reduce dependency on developers.
SAP Hybris
SAP Hybris is an emerging eCommerce platform that helps organizations achieve excellent customer experience by letting consumers efficiently merchandise in B2C and B2B markets. It helps you target customers across various channels with efficiency. It is a platform that features pre-integrated traits like cloud integration, master data, analytics, and marketing. It is best for businesses with personalization and customer engagement. The impressive modular design ensures that it works in sync with the rest of your business architecture to deliver fruitful results.
SAP Hybris is often the choice of businesses with about 50-200 employees, generating about 1M-10M USD. It is renowned in the United States and the retail industry. Looking at it by industry, it seems retail, wholesale, and health segments are the largest occupying, 22%, 13%, and 6% respectively. It flaunts an impressive list of customers, including Nike, AO Smith, Levi Strauss, Adobe, Epson US, General Electric, etc.
The only hurdle with SAP is it does not offer enough guidance and support as its competitors. Therefore, it gets difficult to manage without a dedicated IT expert. In addition, for best results, you might require an integrated content management solution.
BigCommerce
Founded in 2009, BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform that provides customization, simplicity, and enterprise-grade functionality to merchants. It is the platform for thousands of B2C and B2B businesses across numerous industries and 150 countries. It helps businesses to create engaging, customized, and beautiful stores using templates. Some templates are available free of cost, while others can be used by paying a fee. BigCommerce is ideal for businesses with complex catalogs. It offers several features like other eCommerce platforms and also allows third-party extensions. It has packages available in four tiers and one can choose as per the business requirements and sizes.
BigCommerce is ideal for beginners in terms of usability. It makes it easy to modify and edit SEO-related features like page titles and custom URLs. Another plus to its list of pros is its ability to sell in various currencies. Lastly, BiCommerce also offers a wide range of headless capabilities like DXP and CMS to build an unparalleled shopping experience.
The drawback with BigCommerce is it can get harsh on your pocket. Although it is transparent with its fee structure, several add-ons like transaction fees, credit card fees, add-on fees, etc., can mount up to big numbers.
Magento
Released back in 2009, Magento is one of the most renowned eCommerce platforms across the globe. Later in 2015, it came up with version 2.0, featuring more usability features and an improved codebase. Later in 2018, it was purchased by Adobe. It is now available in two versions, namely, Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source. While Magento Open Source is free to use, Magento Commerce can cost you somewhere between 15,000 to 50,000 USD annually. However, even for the free version, you can access advanced features by paying the price. It offers integrated checkouts, global selling, mobile optimization, site, search, customization, Catalog management, etc.
Magento is an ideal eCommerce platform for small-to-medium enterprises that already highlights demand among customers. It is a platform with more than 5,000 extensions for use. However, the development budget and time required are high as compared to its competitors. Plus, there are other problems like immense development cost, time-consuming customization, and lowered speed due to hosting on shared servers.
Magento is best used when you can afford your own Magento developer.
The Open Source Magento users access a knowledgeable and large Magento community where they can find answers to troubleshoot problems and frequently ask questions. You also can boost your sales using the available analytics on Magento.
Saleor.io
Saleor is an eCommerce platform designed for global usage. It is a multi-language, multi-channel, multi-currency, and multi-warehouse platform. Saleor offers excellent features combined into a fast, user-friendly, and efficient dashboard that allows frictionless flexibility and expansion. Saleor reduces your workload by giving you the ability to manage various storefronts, devices, and apps from just one back-end. You can either choose to keep your existing frontend or develop a new one of your choice. With the excellent features, you can create a beautiful and engaging customized experience for your customers.
The open-source solution of Saleor is the fastest-growing eCommerce platform across the world. It enables you to serve thousands of customers and sell millions of products with minimum effort. Horizontal scalability helps Saleor to use platforms like Google Cloud and AWS and get used to your traffic. In addition, Saleor boasts a list of renowned customers like LUSH, RoomLab, Butterfly, PATCH, etc.
Sylius
Sylius is the last entry to the list of emerging eCommerce platforms to look out for in 2020. It is a platform that specializes in offering eCommerce software to businesses from small to enterprise levels. Founded back in 2017, Sylius provides plenty of advanced features with paid plans. Some of the advanced features include free hosting, storage, unlimited pages, customer support, real-time shipping, etc. In addition, Sylius offers support to varying third-party trading platforms facilitating access to various businesses globally.
Customer service is of the essence when your entire business is dependent on your online presence. When dealing and investing with an eCommerce platform, timely support is crucial. Sylius offers services with installation, upgrading, training, and cancelation of services or products. With Sylius, you can get round-the-clock assistance on call, via email, and live chat.
Conclusion
Conclusively, with pros and cons being a part of every eCommerce platform, there is no best platform. Every business has its requirements, budget, and priorities which decide which eCommerce platform works to serve their needs. Examine your requirements and prioritize your demands before you shortlist the eCommerce platforms you might pick from. You can choose to start small and eventually expand your business with time.